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Reality Subtext / Live-Action Films

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Reality Subtext for Live-Action Films.

  • After Earth: Several reviewers have noted the (possibly unintentional) parallel between Cypher pushing his son Kitai to perform in a situation he is ill-prepared for, and Will Smith having his son Jaden in his pet project.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel involved a notable Romance on the Set, as Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone began dating at almost exactly the same time that they began playing the famous couple Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. Fittingly, their onscreen chemistry was one of the most praised aspects of the movies; unlike Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst before them, Garfield and Stone didn't need acting to convince the audience that they were in love.
  • In And God Created Woman, Juliette (Brigitte Bardot) marries Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) but struggles with, and eventually gives in to her attraction to Michel's brother, Antoine. In real life, Bardot was married to the film's director Roger Vadim, but fell in love with Trintignant during filming, and ended up leaving Vadim for him.
  • An unusual case of deliberate invocation by the screenwriters of The Apartment: they would keep track of the actors' real-life experiences and try to integrate them into the plot. That's how the whole gin rummy subplot found its way to the screen (Shirley MacLaine was learning the game at the time). And some offscreen lines of actors discussing their own private lives were also featured in the film, making it a case of offscreen Throw It In!. Here is more.
  • Apocalypse Now:
    • One of the innumerable executive nightmares surrounding the film's production was Martin Sheen having a heart attack due to the stress from filming, suspending filming of all his prominent scenes and making his brother double for him.
    • Then there were the helicopters that the Philippine military lent to Coppola for the famous "air cavalry" scene against a village held by communist Viet Cong insurgents. Those were frequently taken back, interrupting filming, to do actual air cavalry work for the Philippine military units engaged in combat with real communist insurgents.
  • Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a clear analogy for Michael Keaton's struggles with escaping his I Am Not Spock status as the man who played Batman in the first two entries in the 1989 film series. The premise itself, in which an actor attempts to escape his typecasting as the titular Show Within a Show superhero by taking the lead in a play, is an almost note-for-note calling card for Keaton's attempts at escaping the mantle of the Caped Crusader. What's more, the in-universe play is initially a bit of a failure until a big crazy gimmick sparks the attention of the audience—Birdman is itself a film with a pretty major gimmick, that being its extensive use of The Oner.
  • At some point during or before production of Bobby, Lindsay Lohan received word that one of her closest friends had passed away. Lohan used her grief over that event to fuel her during the more emotional scenes in the film.
  • Boyz n the Hood:
    • Since it was shot on location in South Central L.A., the cast and film crew had to deal with many of the same problems with gangs and crime that the movie's characters had to deal with. The dialogue had to be dubbed over in many parts due to gunshots and helicopters in the distance. There were threats of fights between the extras, and in one instance a filming location had to be changed because of threats from a member of the Bloods. The scene in question contained Doughboy, who is heavily implied to be a Crip, shooting someone who is heavily implied to be a Blood. The real-life gang member claimed that he was not responsible if someone actually shot Ice Cube for portraying their gang negatively.
    • The actor who played the blood gang member with the shotgun who murdered Ricky is named Lloyd Avery Jr. In real life, he got mixed up with the gang and criminal lifestyle, despite being a promising actor and eventually kills two people, ending up in prison for it, before he was killed in prison after getting into an argument with another prisoner about religious beliefs. note 
  • Cannibal! The Musical features a subplot about Alferd Packer and his horse, Liane, who runs away and, he later learns, has been ridden by every man in town. The movie was made by Trey Parker shortly after he found out his fiancee Liane had cheated on him.
  • The famous Marseillaise scene in Casablanca features a close up of a woman crying while singing. The film was produced during World War II. Many of the actors, including that woman, were forced to flee Europe due to the German invasion. The emotion in that scene was not faked.
  • In Catwoman (2004), Laurel Hedare is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who was a famous supermodel in her youth until she committed the worst crime in the fashion world: she turned 40. Hedare is played by Sharon Stone, who knows a thing or two about that subject.
  • A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong has an in-universe example. Once the footage of Dennis' birthday party is aired and the entire cast is angry at one another, especially Chris, he uses Scrooge's redemption scene to apologize and make amends with his friends in real life as well as the characters.
  • Cinderella (1965), starring Lesley Ann Warren in the title role, gained this when her onscreen Wicked Stepmother, Jo Van Fleet, developed a real-life jealousy of Warren's beauty.
  • Clerks:
    • The main plot of Clerks II revolves around Dante Hicks attempting to escape his dead-end food service job by moving to Florida with his wealthy fiancée and taking over a car wash business from her father; most critics recognized this as a not-so-subtle commentary on Kevin Smith's attempts to escape the legacy of the original Clerks, which had long defined his career. Notably, the film ends with Dante choosing to re-open the Quick Stop (which burns down in the opening scene) after coming to realize that his time working there was the last time he was truly happy, which most people also recognized as a commentary on Smith's decision to embrace the legacy of the first movie.
    • Clerks II also features Jason Mewes returning to the iconic role of Jay for the first time in five years, with the biggest change to his character being that he had sworn off drugs (doing them, not selling them) and turned to Jesus since the events of the original Clerks. In reality, Mewes had been battling a heroin addiction since the mid-'90s, which greatly damaged his long-time friendship with Kevin Smith, and had got him sent to court-mandated rehab in 2004. When Smith agreed to let Mewes reprise his role in Clerks II in 2006, he did it on the condition that Mewes stay clean. Considering Smith had actually forced Mewes into rehab himself at least once before, and he had earlier refused to cast him in Jersey Girl because of his drug problems, he understood the significance of making Jay an ex-drug user all too well.
    • In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, a flight attendant tells Jay and Bob she can't sell them airline tickets because of a "wait problem", as in the two are on a no fly list: Jay mishears this as "weight problem" and goes on an extended riff about how Bob went vegan after the events of the previous film and lost a significant amount of weight, enough so that Jay's fat jokes about him no longer apply. Kevin Smith, who was also Silent Bob's actor, was once kicked off a flight because he was deemed too overweight to fit in a single seat, and after a health scare, he later slimmed down after adopting a vegan diet.
  • Elizabeth Taylor attempted suicide during the production of Cleopatra, which makes the film’s ending a little hard to watch.
  • The original Coming to America was inspired by Eddie Murphy's personal life. He was frustrated dating women who cared more about being with a celebrity than getting to know him as a person, hence Prince Akeem's desire to find a woman who "loves me for who I am, not what I am."
  • Conan the Cimmerian was noted to be surprisingly cultured and a Cunning Linguist due to his many travels and adventures around the world, and the same happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger while shooting Conan the Barbarian (1982) in Spain, as he had to learn some Spanish to move around and could do lot of tourism through the country. Ahnold loved his time there (even if he was amusingly weirded out by some Spanish customs, like having diner very late into the night) and has returned several times since, even stating he would wish to shoot again in Spain if the long-promised Conan sequel ever gets made. The film also saw the child version of Conan being played by Jorge Sanz, who was a Military Brat in real life and would have later joined the military had he not thrived as an actor.
  • Brandon Lee's fatal shooting with a prop gun during the filming of The Crow (1994) made his portrayal of a musician who was shot to death and came back from the dead for revenge very poignant. The scene in the movie where Eric Draven was killed was heavily edited to change it from an explicit view of Draven being shot to a fast cut of Funboy firing a gun at him, but it couldn't be removed completely because it was the basis of the movie's plot. (Part of this was pragmatic, of course, to hide the double's face.)
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy:
    • In The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger's take on the Joker is constantly twitching his tongue and licking around his lips. Most people thought this was simply one of the Clown Prince's character traits, but according to this article, it wasn't an idle addition:
      "One of several reasons Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker was so mesmerizing was the unnerving way the actor kept sucking at his cheeks and licking his lips. This facial tic was a result of Ledger's initial discomfort with the prosthetic scar make-up, but was eventually adopted as a character idiosyncrasy after Chris Nolan was suitably freaked out."
    • Speaking of The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan seriously considered using actual footage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, due to the fairly explicit parallels to the movie's plot. He ultimately decided not to, averting the trope.
  • In the Deadpool movies, a frequent source of humor involves the X-Men attempting to convince Deadpool to join the team and act like a traditional superhero, both of which Deadpool adamantly refuses to do. Prior to the first film's release, Ryan Reynolds' initial appearance as Deadpool in the relatively family-friendly X-Men Film Series prequel X-Men Origins: Wolverine was trashed by fans and critics for stripping the character of everything that made him such a fan-favorite in the comics, and it took the creative team years to convince 20th Century Fox to let them bring a more faithful portrayal to the screen. The studio wanted to tone down the violence and profane humor of the comics in favor of making a traditional superhero film for general audiences, while the creative team wanted an R-rated movie more in line with the comics. The X-Men's continual attempts to get Deadpool to tone down his antics are reflective of the studio's attempts to do the same.
  • Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze's tense working relationship going back to Red Dawn (1984) compounded the on-screen tension during Baby's Training Montage in Dirty Dancing. Baby's giggling when Johnny Castle brushes his hand down her side, touching her breast, was just Jennifer Grey's nerves getting the better of her. Swayze seems mildly annoyed on most of the takes that ended up in the film.
  • In Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Vincent Price and Robert Quarry play antagonists. According to insiders, the enmity onscreen was not fake: this was Price's last film for API, as he was being pushed aside for a younger actor. His replacement? Robert Quarry.
  • Exit to Eden: Both Dana Delany and her character, Mistress Lisa, have a butt fetish. In an interview, Dana Delany was asked what's her favorite male body part and her answer was "I love butts. There's nothing better than a good butt." During Citizen Elliot's bondage scene Mistress Lisa says:
    Mistress Lisa: I like butts. Men's beautiful behinds. You know what I like to do to gorgeous butts? I like to squeeze them, pinch them and caress them.
  • Jason Miller, at the time the still-struggling writer of a hit play who'd never acted in movies, asked William Friedkin for the chance to test for the role of Father Karras in The Exorcist due to the way the part resonated with his own experience: he'd spent three years himself studying to be a priest until a Crisis of Faith similar to the one Karras was experiencing in the film led him to drop out.
  • Fatso stars Dom De Luise as Dominick DiNapoli a man who is struggling with his weight. The story is a not-at-all disguised take on DeLuise's own struggle with obesity.
  • Fever Pitch:
    • The Farrelly Brothers had to completely rewrite the ending after the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. They were able to actually film at the last game of the series because both Farrelly Brothers and star Jimmy Fallon are actual Sox fans and had personal tickets to the games. Their filming was actually caught live on Fox's broadcast of the actual game!
      • Then again, Fox also produced the film. People unaware of the production probably thought Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore had a thing for each other.
    • This turned out to mirror the true events of Nick Hornby's book from which a directly adapted film was made; the film — made years after the events — ends with Arsenal winning a First Division title on the last game of the season, the first in 12 years.
  • When Tyler Durden, in his rant about Fight Club, says "We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars," he glances at Jared Leto's character. Jared Leto had just formed his own rock band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and Tyler's actor, Brad Pitt, is a "movie god" in his own right.
  • Most of the cast and crew of The Front had been blacklisted — their dates of blacklisting are listed under their names during the end credits, including Zero Mostel and director Martin Ritt.
  • Because Paul Walker, who played Brian O'Conner, died during production of Furious 7, the film had to be rewritten to accommodate it. The film's tagline is "One Last Ride", there's a scene at Han's funeral where the normally lighthearted Roman grimly tells Brian he can't take any more funerals, and there's also the recurring subplot about how Brian can't afford to go haring off around the world and risking his life when he has a family to take care of.
  • The classic 1947 film Gentleman's Agreement has a scene of a meeting where the merits of having the hero pose as a Jewish man to learn first-hand about antisemitism is discussed with senior staff of the magazine. Much of the dialog came directly from meetings of senior executives of Fox Studios discussing the merits of adapting the novel into a film. (It was both a commercial and critical hit and likely was partly the inspiration for John Howard Griffin to pose as a black man in real life in 1959 to learn about racism again blacks, which was the basis of the book and film Black Like Me.)
  • In Ghost (1990), Whoopi Goldberg plays a Phony Psychic who soon discovers she's actually a Not-So-Phony Psychic that actually can talk to the dead. But despite working closely with a recently-slain man, she still doubts her abilities throughout much of the movie. According to Goldberg, she was originally unsure whether she should take the part until Patrick Swayze convinced her and the producers that she'd be perfect. She ended up winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
  • The flashback at the end of The Godfather Part II where the family is together for Vito Corleone's birthday was supposed to have him enter at the end, but Marlon Brando couldn't be gotten back, and instead the scene ends with an announcement that he's there and everybody but Michael rushing out to greet him offscreen. Francis Ford Coppola decided he actually liked it better with Vito remaining unseen since it created a ghostly feeling that the family as it was then, under Vito, is gone forever.
  • At the end of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Spencer Tracy's character says, "...there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you feel for each other that I didn't feel for Christina...the memories are still there, and they'll be there if I live to be a hundred and ten...and if it's half of what we felt, it's everything." The tears in Katharine Hepburn's eyes are real — Spencer Tracy was dying, and she and Tracy had been together for twenty-five years. He died soon after, and she never saw the finished film, saying that the memories of Tracy were too painful.
  • Help!: When The Beatles try to convince Ringo to let them cut off his finger in order to get the cult ring off, Paul says to Ringo "Well, you didn't miss your tonsils, did you?", referencing the fact that Ringo had gotten a tonsillectomy earlier that year.
  • In Hocus Pocus, Sarah Jessica Parker plays one of the three Sanderson Sisters, a trio of evil witches who magically resurrect themselves on Halloween night 300 years after being executed for witchcraft in 17th century Salem. Many years after starring in the film, Parker discovered that she's actually a direct descendant of Esther Dutch Elwell, one of the last women formally charged with witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials.
  • The 1939 adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame had a decidedly more sympathetic portrayal towards the Romani, adding in new themes of humanism and social justice not present in vastly darker, more cynical original Victor Hugo novel. This isn't a coincidence; director William Dieterle was a German who fled his home country as the Nazi war machine was — among other things — committing systematic genocide of the Romani, and writer Sonya Levien explicitly wished to parallel the plight of the fictional people of Roma to that of German Jews. The very day the scene where Quasimodo was ringing the bells for Esmerelda was filmed, the war was properly declared, and everyone on set was so overwhelmed with emotion that Dieterle forgot to yell cut, leaving Charles Laughton ringing until he collapsed from exhaustion.
  • The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was to have starred Heath Ledger, but he died before filming was completed. In a show of support, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell finished the film in his place with the help of a magic mirror (according to an IMDB poster, Ledger has 45 mins of screen-time (out of ~120 total), Law and Farrell 15 each, and Depp 10). The three actors then donated their profits from the movie to Heath Ledger's daughter.
  • Indiana Jones:
  • In Inside Llewyn Davis, Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver play a pair of struggling folk singers who finally get their shot at fame when they're invited to sing backup on a song that ends up becoming a huge radio hit. The movie was released in 2013, when Isaac and Driver were both struggling, mostly-obscure character actors with only a few major credits to their names—but just a few months after it was released in the United States, they actually did get their shot at fame when they were cast as Poe Dameron and Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the long-awaited seventh Star Wars movie. In an amusing coincidence, the song that gives them their shot at the big-time is "Please, Mr. Kennedy", a ballad about a man being launched into outer space.
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is often cited as a portrait of Red Scare America. Trust no one; for your neighbors, your friends, even your wife could become one of them: a godless Commie — er, pod person! By the same token, it's also a view of McCarthyism, with a suspicious Hoover and the FBI keeping Americans under watch. Regardless of any of this, the movie actually averts the trope. Word of God stated repeatedly that they were just making a movie and not going for any social/political commentary.
  • James Bond:
    • In From Russia with Love, Pedro Armendáriz, who played Bond's Turkish sidekick Ali Kerim Bey, was dying of cancer during the production and eventually committed suicide to stop the pain. This makes it particularly poignant when his character makes a Heroic Sacrifice and disappears from the film.
    • Bond has less casual sex in The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill than the rest of the series, and stronger romantic relationships with the Bond Girls of those films. This is because the films came out in the late 80s at the height of the AIDS pandemic and the producers thought it would be in poor taste to glorify promiscuity in that atmosphere. This is also mildly invoked in GoldenEye. Even though Bond was back to his old self by 1995, he makes a quip with Xenia about safe sex, implying that yes, James Bond does know what a condom is.
    • Speaking of GoldenEye, the film was the first in the series to involve the Internet, and the Bond Girl Natalya is a programmer. This aptly reflected the mid-90s when computers and the Internet started becoming a part of everyday life. Since the movie was a soft reboot of the franchise, this was a deliberate attempt at modernizing Bond, along with more overt plot choices like featuring a post-Soviet Russia and a new female M.
  • In the film John Doe: Vigilante, the titular character is a Serial Killer spending his nights killing child molesters/abusers, rapists, and abusive husbands/boyfriends. His final victim is revealed to be the man who murdered his wife and daughter. In an interview, John Doe's portrayer Jamie Bamber admitted that it was very easy to imagine the grief and rage that this man was feeling, as he himself is the Happily Married father of three girls and simultaneously very hard to play the scenes for that very same reason.
  • In The Kids Are All Right, Mark Ruffalo incorporated many of his younger brother's personality traits into his performance. His brother had been shot to death in an unsolved homicide a few years prior, and Ruffalo has stated he regarded the character as a way to pay tribute to his brother.
  • Both Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep were dealing with personal losses during the filming of Kramer vs. Kramer — Streep with the death of her fiancé John Cazale, Hoffman with a divorce — infusing the scenes of their crumbling marriage and subsequent custody battle with a dash of painful realism.
  • Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: Not only were Lara and Richard Croft played by a real-life daughter and father (Angelina Jolie and Jon Voight), but their brief scene even replicates aspects of their strained real life relationship, with her Calling the Old Man Out for being a Disappeared Dad, then telling him she misses him and wishes she could change the past.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • Coincidentally (it is the exact citation from the book, but in the original, it may be connected with WWI) this exchange in The Fellowship of the Ring, which came out in November 2001:
      Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
      Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil.
    • Aragorn is first introduced in The Fellowship of the Ring as "Strider", a mysterious veteran Ranger who unexpectedly joins Frodo and his friends after they've begun their journey to Rivendell, and remains rather aloof from the rest of the Fellowship while guiding and protecting them. This actually parallels how Aragorn's actor, Viggo Mortensen, joined the cast of the movie: he was an unexpected replacement for Stuart Townsend, and joined the cast after a few of Townsend's scenes had already been filmed; while most of the Fellowship's actors had time to get to know each other before filming began, Mortensen was a latecomer, and was somewhat aloof from his castmates during the early part of filming.
  • The violent murder of Macduff's wife and children in Roman Polański's 1971 film adaptation of Macbeth is somewhat difficult to watch due to this trope, as Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate was violently murdered along with four others by followers of the Manson Family.
  • Man on the Moon has enough of this that a whole other movie was made to explore it! Jim Carrey in this podcast interview and the documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond discusses at length how his choice to take a more-than-Method Acting approach to playing Andy Kaufman, a Trolling Creator, in the film was partially rooted in his being tired of maintaining a sunshiny public face as "Jim Carrey" for the sake of his career prospects and longing to be someone who could act exactly as they wanted without justification or apology to anyone confused and/or upset. As well, there is a parallel in Kaufman's distaste for being tied down to the sitcom Taxi and his preference for potentially audience-alienating performance art to Carrey choosing not to be tied down to his mid-'90s blockbusters (Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber) in favor of more complex fare (in particular The Cable Guy and The Truman Show).
  • For The Man Who Invented Christmas, 87-year-old Christopher Plummer is the oldest actor to ever play Scrooge onscreen, making Scrooge begging to do something good before he dies hit even harder.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Iron Man Films:
      • The original film is now largely famous for leading to Robert Downey Jr.'s comeback after his widely publicized problems with substance abuse derailed his career. Appropriately, Tony Stark's struggles with alcoholism have long been a major element of the comic book's mythos, and the first movie is ultimately about Stark resolving to turn his life around after getting a second chance at life.
      • Iron Man 3 was supposed to be an adaptation of the "Demon in a Bottle" storyline but was changed at Downey's behest. He didn't want to get in the headspace to put his own recovery from alcoholism at risk.
      • The Mandarin is often considered a controversial character in a modern context, as he was a Yellow Peril villain created back when East Asians were easy to mock because of the Cold War. Iron Man 3 acknowledged this and subverted it by revealing that the Mandarin is actually a Decoy Leader created by the real villain, who is a white American. It turns out he literally crafted the Mandarin as an over-the-top character to act as a scapegoat for his crimes. Unfortunately, this means that with his final film, and barring any Multiverse shenanigans, the Sacred Timeline's Iron Man died without ever encountering his Arch-Enemy from the comics.
    • The Incredible Hulk (2008): Towards the end of the first phase of the final battle between the Hulk and Abomination, Hulk wrecks a police car and wields the torn halves as massive boxing gloves, a move lifted straight from the video game The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, itself considered one of, if not the best depictions of the Hulk since then.
    • For The Avengers (2012), Mark Ruffalo has stated he was extremely hesitant about taking the role of Bruce Banner. He called Robert Downey Jr. for advice, who convinced him to take the part. Ruffalo ended up kicking ass as Banner/Hulk. This is amusingly similar to their characters' relationship in the movie.
    • At the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Korath has no idea who Peter Quill aka "Star-Lord" is. This lack of recognition reflects the obscurity of the comic series compared to other properties from the MCU. His getting it right at the end reflects the hope that the film could raise its profile among fans. Judging by the reviews and box office totals, this wish likely came true.
    • Ant-Man:
      • The trailers and marketing contained nods to the fact that the character is often considered a complete joke by many people, with one Missing Trailer Scene in particular showing Scott asking if it's too late to change the name. In the film itself, The Falcon looks like he's about to burst out laughing when Ant-Man first tells him his name.
      • When Hope is given the Wasp armor by Hank in The Stinger, she simply grins and says "It's about damn time." This references the fact that despite being one of the founding Avengers in the comics, the Wasp was Adapted Out of the first two Avengers films and the MCU as a whole before that point. It also references the fact that starting with Phase 3, Marvel began more seriously addressing the complaints about the lack of female and and minority superheroes in Phases 1 and 2.
    • Captain America:
      • When making The Winter Soldier, Chris Evans had become so impressed with the combat gameplay for the first film's tie-in video game Captain America: Super Soldier, he and the Russo brothers discussed adapting a similar, more acrobatic fighting style for Cap in the movies. The film ended up receiving praise from both critics and fans for its fight sequences and choreography.
      • Civil War
      • Tony Stark tells Peter Parker that he's here to give him a much-needed revamp and upgrade could be seen as a nod to Marvel Studios trying to fix Sony's Spider-Man franchise after the failure of The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
      • Some have viewed the film's premise of the Avengers splitting into two factions going against each other as being accidentally reflective of the massive friction and tension generated by the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The USA at the time was said to have engaged in a kind of "social civil war" having been deeply polarized by its two candidates, particularly the surprising popularity and support of its most controversial candidate and eventual winner. The film's tagline "United We Stand. Divided We Fall." somewhat highlighted this.
  • The Oracle in The Matrix had to be played by a different actor during The Matrix Revolutions, as the previous actor died from complications of diabetes. Hence that strange scene right before she sends the main characters to the Merovingian, explained in-universe as a case of The Nth Doctor.
  • Medium Cool, a Mockumentary shot and filmed during the Chicago 1968 riots outside the Democratic National Convention. It was supposed to be a film about poverty and media manipulation, and it was contemplated that the finale would be MLK's planned March on Poverty, but the director had it on word from friends in Chicago that a massive demonstration was about to take place, and then MLK and RFK got assassinated during filming, which were incorporated into the plot. Oh, and the film is shot entirely on-location while events took place.
  • Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, a family movie made by recycling bits of footage from a horror anthology rejected by the studio, features Ernest Borgnine as a grandfather who tells his grandson stories from a horror anthology he wrote that the studio rejected.
  • In Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the depraved inventor Rotwang is said to have been previously in love with his boss Joh Fredersen's wife Hel, who left him to marry Fredersen. In real life, Rotwang's actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge was previously married to Fritz Lang's wife Thea Von Harbou (who wrote the film's screenplay, as well as the original novel that it was based on), who left Klein-Rogge to marry Lang after having an extramarital affair with him. That said, Lang and Klein-Rogge reportedly remained good friends for years after the incident, and Lang repeatedly denied that his films reflected his personal life.
  • When Al Michaels reprised his Real Life role as the broadcaster of the US-Soviet Union hockey game in Miracle, most of his lines were scripted. However, the last seconds of the game featured the Real Life call from 1980 in the belief that Michaels could never duplicate that same emotion.
  • In the Miss Marple film Murder Most Foul, the villain appears to have some hereditary violent insanity. Margaret Rutherford herself was terrified that this would happen to her, as her father spent a great deal of time in asylums after murdering his own father and her mother ended up committing suicide while pregnant.
  • In-universe example in Moulin Rouge!; the plot of the Show Within a Show mirrors the romance of Christian and Satine with the looming threat of the Duke. The Duke does not take it well when this is pointed out to him.
  • In the 1996 version of The Nutty Professor, Klump says, "Buddy's who I thought the whole world wanted me to be." This is almost certainly a reference to Eddie Murphy's own movie career. Siskel & Ebert even noted this in their review.
  • Pathfinder (1987) is about the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia being pushed out of their ancestral lands by invaders. The film aired amidst a Sámi civil rights movement following centuries of efforts at cultural erasure.
  • In this scene in Picasso Trigger, Taryn's shown flying a Cessna 172P Skyhawk. Her actress, Hope Marie Carlton is a licensed pilot in Real Life.
  • Charlton Heston appears in Planet of the Apes (2001) as Thade's father. Heston's character, an ape on his deathbed, gives a gun to his son Thade, saying that it has "the power of a thousand swords." His last words, a nod to Heston's original role as the protagonist in the original 1968 film, were "Damn them all to hell" regarding the humansnote . In real life, Charlton Heston was also president of the National Rifle Association.
  • Poltergeist:
    • The family's eldest daughter is entirely missing from Poltergeist II: The Other Side and Poltergeist III, as Dominique Dunne, the actress who played her, had been murdered in 1982. The role was not re-cast and the absence of the character was not mentioned, almost a Brother Chuck. Ms. Dunne also appeared in an episode of Hill Street Blues playing an abuse victim, but many of the bruises on her face were genuine, inflicted by her boyfriend (her eventual killer).
    • The actor who played the evil preacher, Julian Beck, was actually that gaunt: he was dying of cancer and didn't need that much makeup to look like a skeleton.
    • Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne, was noticeably chubby in the third movie due to the medication for her Crohn's disease. She would later die from surgical complications after filming completed in 1988 at 12 years old.
  • The Princess Bride:
    • The reason Mandy Patinkin's Heroic Resolve was so convincing is a bit of very dedicated method acting: he thought of Rugen in that scene as being the cancer that killed Patinkin's own Real Life father.
      "I want my father back, you son of a bitch."
    • Another bit is the fear in Christopher Guest's performance when he faces down Inigo. Patinkin actually had accidentally injured Guest in a training exercise some time beforehand.
  • The Purge:
  • In the movie Push, Dakota Fanning plays a girl with psychic precognitive powers. What makes this particularly funny is Ms. Fanning's apparent extreme intelligence which has led to some jokes about her having actual "powers."
  • Robert De Niro alerted his friend and director Martin Scorsese to boxing biopic Raging Bull in the hope that engaging with the project would help Scorsese address his own self-destructive impulses.
  • Rocky:
    • Both the first and last films mirror Sylvester Stallone's story of making them quite movingly. He had over 30 failed screenplays to his name before United Artists took a chance on Rocky, and he was instantly catapulted to fame and fortune. Then when Stallone tried to make Rocky Balboa, it was at a time when he was a laughingstock after several poor career moves, and no one thought the film could be anything but a disaster. Yet when the film was released, the fans all trumpeted it as a worthy conclusion to the story.
    • Rocky II is about Rocky’s new found fame quickly running out, along with the accompanying financial resources. As a result he reluctantly accepts a challenge from Apollo for a rematch. There was never intended to be a sequel to the original film. They even have a Leaning on the Fourth Wall moment at the end when Apollo tells Rocky there won’t be a rematch and his response that he doesn’t want one. Unfortunately both of Stallone’s follow up starring roles, F.I.S.T. and Paradise Alley, were both critical and commercial flops leading many to suspect that he was destined to become a One-Hit Wonder. Rather than have that be his fate Stallone then wrote and directed the sequel which solidified his place as a star.
    • This trope was further emphasized with the spin-off film Creed, which focuses on Adonis, the son of Apollo Creed, trying to become a boxer in his own right with the aid of Rocky's training. The film was the first in the series that Stallone neither wrote nor directed, and it essentially allowed him to pass the torch to Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan in the same way that Rocky does with Adonis.
    • Rocky IV, which pits Rocky against the brutish Soviet boxer Ivan Drago, was famously released near the end of the Cold War and was made as a blatantly patriotic celebration of America's triumph over Russia. Creed II is an intergenerational story that pits Adonis Creed against Drago's son Viktor, who turns out to be just as much of a brute as his father. Notably, it was made in 2018, during a period of renewed tension between the United States and Vladimir Putin's Russia.
  • The titular rumor of Rumor Has It..., about how Sarah's parents were the inspiration for the movie The Graduate, stems from a real-life rumor that the original novel was inspired by an actual family.
  • Branko Lustig helped to direct Schindler's List, a story about a German man who saved more than a thousand Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Lustig was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp (where up to 1 million Jews were murdered) so the film had very significant meaning to him. This is reflected in the speech he gave at the 1994 Oscars upon the film winning the Academy Award for Best Picture:
    "My number was 83317. I am a Holocaust survivor. It's a long way from Auschwitz to this stage."
  • In A Simple Wish, Annabel and her father have a close relationship following the death of Annabel's mother. This deeply ridiculous movie suddenly becomes a Tear Jerker with the reality subtext: Mara Wilson, who played Annabel, was still recovering from the death of her own mother halfway through the filming of Matilda. She really does adore her father, who single-handedly raised Wilson and her brothers while managing his daughter's film career, thus doing a much better job than Annabel's father.
  • Similar to the Planet of the Apes example above, the tears that Thorn sheds for Sol near the climax of Soylent Green are real, as Charlton Heston is crying for Edward G. Robinson who was dying of cancer at the time (this was Robinson's last film).
  • Space Jam:
    • The subplot with Michael Jordan playing baseball is based very loosely on his real life semi-retirement. It's essential to the plot because it means the aliens don't think to steal his basketball skills and this incident, in turn, leads to him returning to basketball which he also did in real life, making this a sort-of fictional autobiographical account. They even go so far as to acknowledge in-film that Jordan is a subpar baseball player and is only being indulged because of his celebrity.
    • And for those wondering why the hell Bill Murray is in the film trying to play basketball? That's actually a reference to the series of promo ads Murray did for the league circa 1995 claiming he was going to play NBA ball.
  • Spider-Man:
    • It is believed that following 9/11, an entire scene was cut from the first film where Spidey strings a huge web in between the World Trade towers. There was a trailer composed of this scene (which was, obviously, pulled after the attacks), but whether this scene was from the movie or created specifically for the trailer is less certain.
    • Likewise the scene where the New Yorkers help out Spidey against Green Goblin as he tries to save a tram of school kids and Mary Jane i.e. the citizens of the city banding together.
  • In Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Ricardo Montalbán's character confronts the Evil Former Friend who left him wheelchair-bound... then delivers a quietly passionate speech about everything his disability has cost him and everything he's learned from it, culminating in offering his forgiveness, which said friend emotionally accepts. It's also a case of Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Montalbán was paralyzed by a botched spinal surgery and was speaking from personal experience.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country:
      • The movie entails the forging of peace between long-standing enemies, the Federation and the Klingon Empire, as the Klingons face extinction following the destruction of their moon, Praxis. The film, released in 1991, bluntly parallels the ending of the Cold War as tensions between the United States (the Federation) and the Soviet Union (Klingons) had subsided partially due to the potential damage done to Russia, one of the world's greatest superpowers, after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 (the destruction of Praxis).
      • Additionally, Star Trek VI marked the official Grand Finale for the Original Series era of the Trek Verse and was the final bow for the original cast, hence their signatures at the end credits. It was also the last Star Trek production that franchise creator Gene Roddenberry was involved in as he passed away days after watching the finished film.
    • Star Trek Into Darkness:
      • The central plot of the movie, which involves a villain's plan to turn Starfleet into a more militaristic version of itself, is largely reflective of the fandom's concerns about the once-optimistic franchise taking a Darker and Edgier turn and overemphasizing action and conflict at the expense of creative storytelling. Fittingly, the movie ends with Kirk and company beginning their five-year exploration mission, with Kirk giving a speech about the importance of Starfleet staying true to its founding principles of peacekeeping and discovery.
      • The film can also be seen as an example of a once-good government taking increasingly dark and amoral actions in the name of protecting its citizens from a perceived outside threat, a subject that is very relevant to the post-9/11 western world.
    • Star Trek Beyond:
      • In this film, Spock learns about the death of his Prime Timeline version and - Vulcan stoicism aside - is devastated, later speaking of how he wants to "live as he did". A sentiment that Zachary Quinto likely feels just as his character does, given his friendship with the late Leonard Nimoy.
  • Star Wars:
    • The first major action sequence in The Empire Strikes Back, where Luke is attacked by a Wampa, was created solely to explain the scars on Mark Hamill's face from a bad car accident that Hamill was in towards the end of filming A New Hope.
    • One of Harrison Ford's more memorable ad-libs in A New Hope is generally agreed to be the scene where Han attempts to bluff his way through a radio conversation with an Imperial officer on the Death Star after the heroes accidentally get into a firefight with a few Stormtroopers. Han's flustered efforts to bluff his way through the exchange ("Uh... Everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you... How are you?") are all the more believable because Ford neglected to memorize his lines for that scene, and actually was improvising as he went along. Han's wincing expression at the end of that monologue (as if to say "They couldn't possibly have bought that...") was actually Ford's expression, as he was absolutely sure that he'd screwed up that take.
    • General Hux, one of the Co-Dragons in The Force Awakens, was born during the last days of the Galactic Empire. His actor was born on May 12, 1983. Return of the Jedi was released on May 25 of the same year.
  • In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond, a forgotten silent film star is played by Gloria Swanson, a forgotten silent film star herself. Her butler, Max, who was a leading director in the silent film era, is played by Erich von Stroheim, who was a leading director in the silent film era. For bonus points, the Stock Footage of a younger Swanson chosen to represent Norma Desmond as she was as a silent film star was from the obscure feature Queen Kelly, which was directed by von Stroheim. Norma also used to work with Cecil B. DeMille, who appears in the film playing himself; in real life, he did work with Swanson several times.
  • In Team America: World Police, several Hollywood actors and creators are mocked for their liberal politics, with Michael Moore being one of the prime targets. The reason for this was that Moore had used Manipulative Editing and a South Park-style cartoon in Bowling for Columbine to make it appear that Trey Parker and Matt Stone worked on the film with him and were in favor of his ideology. They didn't and they weren't, so this was their way of getting revenge.
  • Terminator:
    • Terminator Genisys: Besides the franchise's classic catchphrases, one of the T-800's new Catch Phrases was "Old, but not obsolete", referring to critics who felt that Arnold Schwarzenegger had become too old to play the Terminator anymore.
    • More broadly, the stories and themes of the Terminator films have more-or-less always evolved to fit the political and social climate of their moment in time, in some ways more subtle than others. To elaborate:
      • The original film (released in 1984, during a period of resurgent tensions in the Cold War) features Sarah Connor preparing to face a seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust—reflecting American culture's then-contemporary fears about the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Appropriately enough: it also introduces Skynet as a global network of armed satellites, which bears a noticeable resemblance to the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative, which was announced the year before the film was released.
      • Terminator 2: Judgment Day (released in 1991, the year that the Cold War ended) features John and Sarah Connor successfully preventing the nuclear holocaust that Sarah had previously feared, proving that it's not so inevitable after all—reflecting American culture's then-contemporary sense of relief after the long-prophesied nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union never came to pass.
      • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (released in 2003, shortly after the 9/11 attacks) features John Connor and Kate Brewster facing an uncertain future after discovering that the nuclear holocaust of "Judgment Day" really is inevitable, and Skynet's defeat was never going to last forever—reflecting American culture's reckoning with the onset of the War on Terror, which ended a decade of relative peace and stability following the end of the Cold War. It also reimagines Skynet as a global network of computers, reflecting the then-recent rise of the internet.
      • Terminator Salvation (released in 2009, when the War on Terror had been raging for nearly a decade) is an epic war film focused on the Forever War between Skynet and the Resistance—reflecting American culture's growing weariness with the seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The plot also introduces a new breed of Terminator programmed to believe that it's human, reflecting American culture's fears about terrorists Hiding in Plain Sight among the American populace.
      • Terminator Genisys (released in 2015, just as digital technology was becoming more ubiquitous than ever) reimagines Skynet as a high-tech digital operating system that rises to power by exploiting humanity's reliance on portable computers in everyday life—reflecting American culture's growing anxieties about cyber warfare and the potential dangers of information manipulation.
      • Terminator: Dark Fate (released in 2019, during a resurgent period of social consciousness in the United States) features a young Mexican woman stepping up to fill the role of humanity's savior following the death of John Connor—reflecting contemporary discourse on diversity and feminism in the wake of one of the largest women's rights demonstrations in American history. It also briefly portrays the US Border Patrol in an antagonistic context, which many critics viewed as a reflection of the Trump administration's controversial policy on undocumented immigration from Mexico.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen wrote in a bit where Shia LaBeouf's character Sam gets his hand injured, due to Shia actually injuring his hand when in a car accident during filming. Considering the nature of the movie, it didn't affect filming much at all.
  • In The Train, it was necessary to add a scene where Burt Lancaster's character was shot and injured while crossing a bridge because the actor had injured his knee playing golf and could only walk with a limp.
  • Tyler Perry has discussed in several interviews that his movies are based on his Rags to Riches life story. Some examples include the prevalence of Rape as Backstory in his movies, relating to his childhood when he was molested several times.
  • The Wachowski Sisters:
    • The interest in masked characters (i.e. V, Racer X) in their films might have something to do with their reclusiveness as well as Lana and Lilly having to live most of their lives as men.
    • When they returned to the public with Cloud Atlas, with its actors and actresses playing different genders and races, you can see it as a parallel to Lana's life.
  • The Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line starts out with the tragic death of Johnny's older brother when he was a kid. Joaquin Phoenix, who played the adult Cash, said it was very hard to film scenes that dealt with this, because of his own brother's death years earlier.
  • Michael Douglas began shooting Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps shortly after his son Cameron was sent to prison on drug-dealing charges, the latest installment in his long battle with addiction. Six years earlier his half-brother Eric had also died of an overdose. Gekko's emotions as he recalls his own ultimately futile efforts to prevent his son's overdose are thus very real for Douglas.
  • In the director's cut of the Watchmen film, an FBI agent offers Laurie a smoke and Laurie responds by glaring at him. In real life, Warner Bros. barred her character from smoking for fear of promoting the habit, much to the chagrin of fans and Malin Åkerman.
  • Wonder Woman (2017):
    • A key part of the Wonder Woman mythos is that Princess Diana is an Amazon, a member of a legendary race of all-female warriors who defy traditional gender roles to become one of the most elite groups of soldiers on Earth. When she finally got her own big-budget Hollywood movie after years of failed attempts, Israeli actress Gal Gadot was chosen to play her. Israel is, rather famously, one of the only countries in the world that not only allows women to serve in the military (up to and including in combat), but actually requires it. Gadot is no exception: she served in the Israeli Defense Forces for two years, making her the first Wonder Woman actress who's actually a veteran herself.
    • The film was the first resounding success for the DC Extended Universe, which had long lingered behind the long-running Marvel Cinematic Universe in both critical reception and box-office returns. It also seems to have been made (in part) as a Spiritual Antithesis to Marvel's film Captain America: The First Avenger, another war-themed period piece about the origin of a superhero with a patriotic costume. Fittingly, much of the movie involves Diana trying to escape the shadow of a handsome American soldier named "Steve", played by an actor named "Chris". The movie even ends with "Steve" pulling a Heroic Sacrifice to stop a loaded plane from destroying the world's major cities.
  • A major theme in X-Men: Days of Future Past is the concept of a second chance in the face of the mutant race's impending extinction. This could be seen as a nod to the fact that the movie was seen by some as a last-ditch effort to revitalize the X-Men Film Series, which had been in a critical and box office tailspin since the release of X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

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